The Dance of the Mad Children
by Koi Lungfish
Summary: Character vignette: Jenova and her infectees.


Title: The Dance of the Mad Children 

**Author: **Koi Lung Fish****

**Disclaimer:** Based on characters and situations from Final Fantasy VII (© 1997, 1998 Square Co., Ltd). Used without permission. Text © 2001, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved.)

**Subject: **A character vignette on Jenova and her infectees.

            They all dance, the children of Jenova, dance until they drop. Tangled on her skeins, they shuffle and flop in circles askew, everything lies out of true, fumble and hop, again and again. When she pauses her playing, they all petrify.

            Her soft voice is the harmony, a persistent tone subtly pervading their existences. She calls the tune: Mama plays piano for her stone lions.

            (Freeze! When the music stops, someone's going to fall down)

            The dance of the mad children – circling, cavorting, spiralling together and apart, together and apart, intersecting spirals of decay and apotheosis.

            Gast is her introduction, her base line, the foundation for her Babel skyscraper. He is lost in the music, background noise, face outwards from the circle of her dancers, one candle finger pointing to the window where future's faces peer in at the spastic motions of her children. Ignored, forgotten, obscurata, buried in sound.

            Vitrified forever; a stone lion who never heard the music.

            (Don't move until the music begins)

            Music for mad children; the circling of the crippled, the mute and blind. The orphans of old dreams, the foundlings of horrors.

            Vincent is her melody, despairing voice of the orca suffocating in the shallows and squeal of the hare broken in the snare. His screams are her accompaniment; the soloist, the vocalist, St. Vitus' flagellating every nerve as he shakes in her clenched fist. His molecules vibrate to her tune; he dances with his atoms, trembles and falters beneath his frozen surface. He is the choir, a pentagram of voices baying from a single throat, studioed in mildewed stone. He convulses, thrashes and sways, a five-tongued singer with no words to sing; only his agony fits the tempo.

            This stone lion plays the game so awfully well. He can stand still until the sun stops spinning.

            (Move and you're out)

            The dance of the mad children – incestuous and intertwined, switching partners, switching parents, circle around the unbound orphan crying in the centre of his cage.

            Lucrecia, the dancer, twirling en pointe between lovers and madmen, spinning like a snowflake in a hurricane's eye. She is the eye of the needle through which all thread passes, the centre of gravity: she started the dance, but she no longer holds the tune. Her head hangs to her milk-heavy breast, her arms leaden without child-weight, her fibula and tibia kick to the beat, toe-bones snapping as she pirouettes in her partners' arms. A child's favourite doll, worn out and frayed, limbs attached by aging thread, all ready to drop, stop, lay still at last.

            Stone lions are always waiting to move. For Lucrecia, the dance will last forever.

            (Stop the music; someone drops down)

            The dance of her mad children – madness she made with a troubled heart, changing partners in the oldest dance. One alone cannot tango with two; so one plus one plus one made four, and four danced around the piano, carrying their train of lace that twined around their fingers, made them grey and icy to keep touching at bay, to keep loving away. Mama's waxy, swollen fingers press martyr-bone keys, stroke black-notes cut from loathing and the dance plays on.

            Hojo, the coloratura, the highlight, exciting the brightest notes from Vincent's repertoire of anguish, stick-figure contraposition to Lucrecia's rag-doll motion; he is the crack in the mirror, the rot in the meal, the rat in the bed, the tapeworm of joy and cancer of innocence. Addition, embellishment, irreverence, foumart and musk-stain.

            When the stone lions move, he is the first to point and laugh.

            (Never move)

            The mad children, parents all of the mad child, the dancer most damaged, eyelids opened by razorblades, slug-tongued, mucus-lunged, cyanotic, isotropic – the dance plays for him.

            Sephiroth; virtuoso, favourite son, the mute who cannot use his hands – his bones must speak for him. Within the echo chamber of his ribcage, his heart is her drum; she pounds his skins with frozen fists. Fortified in larval cocoon of life-stone, submerged in chilling planet-blood, the rhythm of frenzied limbs, the feeding of the swarm, an avalanche of pebbles: every greedy beat rattles like teeth shaken in the chamber of a skull. Unfurling the wings of angels that never saw heaven, every feather shakes the firmament when his pennons proclaim her dance across the skies. The core of her rhythm shines through his eyes; her starvation pulses between his ribs. Every day the bargain is the same; one more life to prolong his growth, his foetal heartbeat stirring green life-brine: icy valves hammer out the beat of her dance.

            The dance of the mad children.

            Up and down and around and around, they circle, they spin, tangled in spider-webs, strangled by floating hair.

            Apart – separated by the blade-length.

            (All fall down)

            The waltz of the driven storm, his dance, pointless, whipped by the chill thunder-breath, spasming helplessly in the grip of wind-strings: puppet Cloud. Allegro, furioso, prestissimo – troppo! troppo! he cries, but on she plays, on he trips: puppet of a puppet, the plaything of a toy. He is counterpoint, the anti-rhythm, a step out of time, sharp when others lie flat, at angles to the world. He hides beneath the piano, baby scared, the drumming of the bloodless heart and the skeleton rattle of ivory keys pierced by sad sore wails and the castanet snap of dry joints, breathing in fungus spores.

            (Move and you're dead)

            Refusing the dance, he sees all the rot; the piano is riddled with woodworm and the strings are all broken. Mama's voice is the shriek of the shrike, the snap of the trap, the scrape of iron against the steel. He will rise and pull down her veil, baring the mouldering face to all her children; her eye sockets full of mucus and her mouth that spills maggots, the worms boiling under her skin, eye-shadow bacteria and the mildew rouge on her cheeks.

            The dance will end.

            (Stop the music: all fall down)

            The spasms of corpses that jerk to her dance will fail.

            (All fall down dead)

            Fail and fall, stop all still.

            (Never move again)

            Shades of winter evening fall across the piano; puppet child stands shorn of strings amongst the stone lions.

            (Never move, unless the music starts again)

            Mama sits rigor-stiff at the piano, calcareous fingers crumbling upon the keys of bone and spite. Shadows grow long in the evening; spires of light's absence stretching from petrified figures.

            (Freeze! When the music stops, someone's going to fall down and die)

            When the music stops, Mama's going to die. When Mama dies, the music stops forever.

            When the music stops, all fall down, cold and dead as the day you were born.

**Author's notes & addenda:**

            Scarlet Seraph correctly guessed one of the games: "Musical Statues." As nobody else guessed the second game – "Dead Lions," also known as "Sleeping Lions" – she gets the vignette. Inspired by "Homogenic," an excellent album by Björk. Feedback excruciatingly welcome.

            **St. Vitus:** Patron saint of epileptics and suffers of other nervous disorders, including Sydenham's chorea (St. Vitus Dance).

            **Foumart:** Archaic; another name for a polecat.

            **Allegro: **Italian; to play music quickly.

**            Furioso: **Italian; to play music furiously and fast.

**            Prestissimo:** Italitan; to play music extremely quickly.

**            Troppo:** Italian; lit. "Too much!"

**Email:** spacepriest@dial.pipex.com


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